Re: Debian sid testing progress
On 08/14/2018 11:29 AM, Rogério Brito wrote:
>>> FWIW, I am currently trying to fix the Rust compiler on 32-bit PowerPC so
>>> that we will eventually be able to use Firefox and Thunderbird on PowerPC
>>> again.
>
> That would certainly be very nice, Adrian, since without that, we have essentially no browser on PowerPC (and, the ones that we had had many issues that I can't
> recall right now).
It's not easy though. I have been trying to bisect the problem for several days
now, see: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/50960
There are also other important tasks on PowerPC that need to be worked on, most
importantly the transition from Yaboot to GRUB for PowerPC Macs (we are already
using GRUB for IBM PowerPC machines on powerpc and ppc64).
Frank Scheiner has worked on the GRUB support for Macintosh, but there is still
one unresolved issue. Switching from Yaboot to GRUB would alleviate all the
boot problems people have when using Yaboot which doesn't support many modern
filesystems or even ext4 features.
>> Nice. I wish my coding skills weren't so old-school, or I could offer help beyond just testing. It would be nice to see Quantum's speed and efficiency (to the
>> extent that it would be effective) on PPC machines. This could possibly have a carry-over affect on TenFourFox, the Mac OS X/PowerPC fork of Firefox-ESR, as
>> Cameron is basically left to applying security patches and optimizations to the old ESR code.
>
> Some of the code (that is, the non-OSX parts) that Kaiser Cameron is producing (especially the Altivec optimizations to decoding videos and the JIT of Firefox)
> would be quite welcome if supplied in a clean fashion to Mike Hommey, the Debian maintainer of Firefox (who also happens to be an upstream developer at Mozilla).
I don't think there are good chances to get JIT support for PowerPC merged
into Firefox upstream, but if someone would do the job and be willing to
maintain the code, it can happen.
> I saw people mentioning that playing videos with mplayer, vlc etc is slow on G4 machines. That is because packages in Debian are compiled for the lowest common
> denominator, which is no Altivec at all.
I'm pretty sure that mplayer has runtime detection for features like Altivec, doesn't it?
> Ideally, some of these issues could be automated and the installs should "just work".
Issues should be compiled into a list and reported as bugs, tagged accordingly:
User: debian-powerpc@lists.debian.org
Usertags: powerpc
X-Debbugs-CC: debian-powerpc@lists.debian.org
Please always check for existing bugs first and tag them if they haven't already
been tagged.
Adrian
--
.''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' : Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
`- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
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